It’s a Tuesday, and the request has been sitting in your box since the first of the month. Four days in March. His daughter turns ten, his wife found a cabin down in Hocking Hills, and his in-laws want to fly in from Arizona if it’s actually happening.
You’ve looked at it maybe six times. Every time, something on the schedule makes you set it back down. Two people are already off that week. Somebody’s on light duty and nobody can tell you when he’s coming back. So you tell yourself you’ll answer it when the picture clears up.
What you can’t see from your side of the desk is everybody else waiting on it. His wife checks that cabin listing every night. His in-laws are watching the airfare climb. The guy two lockers down offered to cover a shift for him and can’t plan his own week until he knows. Your “let me look at it” has four or five households on hold, and not one of them can see the schedule you’re staring at.
Most of the time it ends the same way. You finally sign it a week out, maybe less. The staffing was fine all along. The cabin’s gone, the flights doubled, and he says thanks anyway, because that’s what you say to the person who signs your schedule.
What you’ll never hear about is the second time he almost asked. He stood in your doorway, saw you were on the phone, and decided not to push. He’d rather lose the cabin than be the guy who nags the boss about time off. That’s how much weight a “maybe” carries when it comes from the person above you.
Most of us who’ve ever held the schedule have been that supervisor at least once. I’m not writing this from the high ground.
What Grant said
I’ve spent the last few weeks with Ron Chernow’s biography of Grant, and there’s a moment in it I keep coming back to. A staff officer brings Grant a request for a major expense, and Grant approves it almost before the man finishes talking. The officer, a little rattled, asks if he’s sure. Grant says:
“No, I am not, but in war anything is better than indecision. We must decide. If I am wrong we shall soon find it out, and can do the other thing. But not to decide wastes both time and money and may ruin everything.” (Grant, Ron Chernow)
He wasn’t sure. He said so out loud, to a subordinate, and signed it anyway. I’ll admit I like him more for that than for Vicksburg.
A leave request isn’t a war, and nobody is going to ruin everything over four days in March. But the math works the same way. Sitting on it feels careful. It isn’t free. The cost just lands on somebody who isn’t in the room, so you never have to look at it.
And if we’re being straight with ourselves, a lot of the waiting isn’t about information. It’s about not wanting to be the one who approved it when the schedule goes sideways. Wait long enough and the decision makes itself, and then it’s nobody’s fault. That’s a comfortable place for a supervisor to hide. It’s a lousy place for the people working for you.
Leave requests are just the easiest place to see it. The same thing happens with the transfer request you’re “still thinking about,” the schedule change you’ve been kicking around since summer, the talk you owe the officer whose work has been slipping while you wait for one more incident to make it easier. Each one feels like patience from the inside. From the outside it looks like nobody’s driving.
Get it off your desk
A few things that have helped me, and that I’ve watched help other supervisors who were better at this than I was.
Give the wait a date. If you really do need to check and follow up before you can answer, fine. Tell him that, and tell him when. “I’ll have an answer by Friday.” Now he can tell his wife something. Now you’ve got a deadline too, which is half the point.
Figure out how hard it is to undo. Approving leave and then coming up short isn’t a disaster. You ask for a volunteer, you offer a swap, you eat some overtime. Annoying, but fixable. Two weeks of a family not knowing whether they’re going on vacation isn’t fixable. Nobody gives those two weeks back.
Know your “other thing” before you sign. Grant could move fast because he’d already made his peace with being wrong and changing course. If I approve this and the other officer isn’t cleared to return, what do I do? If you can answer that in one sentence, you can approve it today.
When somebody under you makes the call, approves the leave, and then has to burn overtime to cover it, back them up. Out loud, in front of people. If the only supervisors who get praised are the ones who turned out to be right, you’ll grow a crop of supervisors who don’t answer anything until it’s too late to be wrong.
Your people figure that out fast, by the way. They quit asking early. They start calling out the morning of. Eventually they stop believing this job will ever let them plan a life, and some of them go find a job that will. Nobody puts “my sergeant sat on my leave request” in an exit interview, but it’s in there.
I believe the time a leader takes off is proportional to the trust they have in their team. I think the same thing is true of the time off a leader approves. The supervisors who sit on every request are usually the ones who don’t quite believe the shift can survive without everybody on it.
Sometimes that’s a real staffing problem, and you should say so plainly and push it up the chain. But a lot of the time it’s a confidence problem, and it belongs to the supervisor, not the shift. A team that’s been trained well can run short for four days in March. If yours can’t, the leave request isn’t your problem. It’s just where you noticed it.
I disconnect for a few days every quarter, phone off, and the place keeps running. That isn’t luck with staffing. It’s that the people around me have been trusted with real decisions long enough that they don’t need me for every one of them.
Grant didn’t know. He said so, and he signed.
Sign the request. If you’re wrong, you’ll find out soon enough, and you’ll do the other thing.
Inaction is unacceptable.